This section defines the SMIL 2.1 Metainformation Module composed of a
single module. This module contains elements and attributes that allow
description of SMIL documents.
Since these elements and attributes are defined in a module, designers of
other markup languages can choose whether or not to include this
functionality in their languages.

The World Wide Web was originally built for human consumption, and
although everything on it is machine-readable, this data is not
machine-understandable. It is very hard to automate anything on the Web, and
because of the volume of information the Web contains, it is not possible to
manage it manually. Metadata is "data about data" (for example, a library
catalog is metadata, since it describes publications) or specifically in the
context of this specification "data describing Web resources".
The solution proposed here is to use metadata information to describe SMIL
documents published on the Web.

The earlier SMIL 1.0 specification allowed authors to describe documents
with a very basic vocabulary using the meta element.
The SMIL 2.1 Metainformation module defined in this specification fully
supports the use of this meta
element from SMIL 1.0 but it also introduces new capabilities for describing
metadata using the Resource Description Framework Model and Syntax [RDFsyntax], a powerful meta information language
for providing information about resources.

To insure backward compatibility with SMIL 1.0, the meta element as specified in the SMIL 1.0
[SMIL10] Recommendation can be used to
define properties of a document (e.g., author/creator, expiration date, a
list of key words, etc.) and assign values to those properties.

SMIL 2.1 extends SMIL 1.0 meta information functionalities with the new
metadata element to host RDF
statements as RDF provides a more general treatment of metadata.
RDF is a declarative language and provides a standard way for using XML to
represent metadata in the form of statements about properties and
relationships of items on the Web. Such items, known as resources, can be
almost anything, provided it has a Web address. This means that you can
associate metadata information with a SMIL document, but also a graphic, an
audio file, a movie clip, and so on.

RDF is the appropriate language for metadata. The specifications for RDF
can be found at:

Additionally, a specific SMIL metadata RDF Schema could contain a set
of additional metadata properties that are common across most uses of
multimedia.

Note: Individual industries or individual
content creators are free to define their own metadata RDF Schema, but
everyone is encouraged to follow existing metadata standards and use
standard metadata schemas wherever possible to promote interchange and
interoperability. If a particular standard metadata schema does not meet
your needs, then it is usually better to define an additional metadata
schema in RDF that is used in combination with the given standard
metadata schema than to totally avoid the standard schema.

This attribute identifies a property name. The name attribute is required for meta elements. The list of properties
for the name attribute is open-ended. This specification defines the
following properties:

base: The
value of this property determines the base URI for all relative
URIs used in the document.Note: SMIL 2.1 deprecates the base property in favor of
the more general XML base url mechanisms currently being
completed[XMLBase]. The language
profile is responsible for specifying which of these technologies
are specifically supported.

The metadata element contains
information that is also related to meta information of the document. It acts
as the root element of the RDF tree. The metadata element can contain the
following child elements: